Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Republicans’ New Plan to Rig Future Presidential Elections

Voter suppression laws are sooo 2012. And besides that, they backfired. But now: onward and upward.Nobody ever accused Republicans of learning from an electoral defeat. Party leaders never say “gee, maybe the voters don’t want a few billionaires to eliminate workers’ safety laws” or “I guess the voters don’t want to turn the clock back to the 1600s and bring back the Salem Witch Trials.” Nope, it’s always “we didn’t communicate our message effectively enough” or “we need to be more devious and corrupt; tilt the playing field even further to the right.”Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio have come up with a new twisted convoluted scheme for rigging the Electoral College for future presidential elections. All three of these states are swing states that are controlled by Republicans, and President Obama carried all three of these states in 2008 and 2012. Rightwing power brokers cannot allow this to happen again.Currently every state hands out electoral votes on a statewide basis, but apparently that outdated method isn’t corrupt enough. Virginia’s “solution” to the problem is being proposed by State Senator Charles Carrico Sr. (R—Blows the Koch Brothers). It works something like this:The state’s electoral votes would be divvied up based on which candidate got the most votes in each congressional district. Virginia, for example, has thirteen electoral votes and eleven congressional districts. A presidential candidate would get one electoral vote for each district where he/she won the popular vote. The remaining two electoral votes would go to the candidate who won the majority of the eleven congressional districts.Just reading that previous paragraph, does your head hurt as much as mine??? WTF?!?!?! Just imagine, if these sleazy cocksuckers put one tenth as much brain power into SOLVING problems instead of creating hare-brained labyrinthine schemes to rig the election…And this scheme is even more corrupt than it sounds on the surface. Example: Obama won Virginia’s popular vote last month by four percentage points. But he only won four of Virginia’s eleven congressional districts. If Virginia’s vote-rigging scheme had been in place last month, Mitt Romney would have carried Virginia even while losing the state’s popular vote by four points.If every GOP-controlled swing state had had this scheme in place last month — that’s Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 election.

7 Comments:

"If every GOP-controlled swing state had had this scheme in place last month — that’s Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 election."

I suspect if the tables were turned, Democrats would be proposing the same thing. Solution? A national standard, every state the same, for the allocation of electoral college votes...or elect the president on the popular vote alone.

The plan isn't corrupt, in the sense that it works the same for candidates of both parties. What Republicans are trying to do is find some way to overecome their lack of numbers. Most Americans disagree with them on a range of policy matters, as polls have consistently shown for a long time. Demographics are increasingly going against the political right. And right now, they're rattled because billions spent on propaganda didn't have the desired effect. Plus, their "you better be scared" tactics have become ineffective from overuse. So now, they're cornered, desperate and coming up with more-dangerous schemes

What this latest scheme is intended to do is leverage their recent advantage in state legislatures via gerrymandering, so they can win a bunch of states without actually having a majority of voters favoring their pols. Gerrymandering is how they took over Texas.

But this new scheme might end up being a hard sell, because I think most Americans look on the Electoral College as an outdated and unnecessary device. I think most people would favor a pure popular vote, as Jerry suggests.

Erik: Republicans are always too power-drunk to ever imagine the tables being turned.

jadedj: I like them better when they don't have a plan.

Demeur: I think that day is long overdue.

SW: Right now I don't think there's any public groundswell for eliminating the Electoral College. But I suspect there will be one if state legislators keep tampering with it and coming up with these ridiculous schemes to rig the vote.